Tag Archives: LGBT

TONIGHT I HAD the privilege of attending a ‘Celebration of Freedom’ for a young man I have supported who has won the right to remain in the UK following a successful appeal against a decision to deny him asylum and return him to a country where being gay can mean imprisonment and even death. His courage has been amazing and… Read more »

AFTER AN 11 hour day in work I have come home to review the personal statement on a job application form that needs to be submitted tomorrow, and the text looks something like this. Summing up a career and why I want a new job is an interesting and challenging means of reflection. I love my work with the LGBT youth group,… Read more »

SINCE TODAY WAS our ‘demiversary’ (six months since our civil partnership) I am cheating by sharing my favourite photo taken on that day instead of today. As my friend Sean catches the owl that flew the length of the church aisle carrying our rings, our family and friends looked on amazed, as we had kept this moment secret. This was… Read more »

THIS IS an unusual sight for me at 5pm on a weekday – our front door! As co-ordinator of the UK’s longest running LGBT youth group, I work late at least two evenings a week. This week we are increasing to opening three times a week, for the first time in its 36 year history. In the last three years,… Read more »

NATIONAL COMING OUT DAY (NCOD) has been celebrated on 11th October in the US and increasingly around the world, since 1988. NCOD celebrates individuals who publicly identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender (LGBT) and coming out about sexual orientation and/or gender identity as a cultural rite of passage for LGBT people. It marks the anniversary of the 1987 National March… Read more »

ON OCTOBER 12th SEEN, the LGBT community magazine for Merseyside, will host the second annual SEEN Awards. This year there are several new awards, including ‘Inspirational Person of the Year’. When the shortlist was announced at the end of August I was pleasantly surprised to find I am on it. Am I inspirational? Clearly someone thought so, otherwise I wouldn’t… Read more »

THIS is a detail of Jacob Wrestling With The Angel, by Alexander-Louis Leloir (1865). I discovered this image as I began writing my coming-out-in-faith story. I believe the story which inspired it has something to teach us about our identity, which may explain its popularity as a source of inspiration for artists, and why it speaks to me of my own… Read more »

IN MY LAST POST I explained how I began to find my voice while contributing to The Exuberant Church by Rev Barbara Glasson. As Barbara and I discussed the coming out process, I had a strong sense that I needed to help her write her story and, in doing so, I began to write my own. I started in Spring… Read more »

I BEGAN to find my voice and share my story in 2009 when an author friend approached me to talk about ‘coming out’ – she wanted to get an understanding of this extraordinary process of identity-claiming to see what it might reveal to those people of faith who struggle to accept diversity of sexual orientation and gender identity in their communities. A… Read more »

TOMORROW I turn 42. In the first novel and radio series of Douglas Adams‘ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a group of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings demand to learn the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything from the supercomputer, Deep Thought, specially built for this purpose. It takes Deep Thought 7½ million years to compute and check the answer,… Read more »